Abandoning the Established Designer Brands

Lately, a set of new urban clothing designers has emerged. These new designers create edgy "urban" clothing, but not necessarily hip-hop clothing which is often connected with the word "urban". The word urban technically means "relating to the city" and these designers create city and street-style urban clothing, shoes and accessories for metropolitan hipsters. Hundreds of these new street brands have cropped up in recent years, striving to create something different than the mass-produced products available in American malls.

Some of these brands include WESC (We Are the Superlative Conspiracy), LRG, Obey, Scifen, Creative Recreation, Orisue, Gentle Fawn, Dealers of the Purple Cloth and Cheap Monday. Because they aren't mass-produced, these designer goods are priced between the low-end clothing store prices and high-end designer prices, making them an affordable luxury for the young teen and college-age crowd they are marketed to.

There has even arisen a new genre of clothing store to sell these new designer brands to young men and women. One such online clothing store, Karmaloop, was founded in 1999. Their mission statement was "to battle the evil forces of McFashion in a world populated by Abercrombie Zombies." Karmaloop has become a very successful company, and has helped to put many of these up-and-coming new urban clothing designers on the map by being the first major retail store to make a large purchase of their clothing. Karmaloop even sells some designers' clothing through their consignment-like setup called the Karmaloop Kazbah. Another such online retail store, 80's Purple, was founded in 2004 and has now gained prominence as a major competitor of Karmaloop. Karmaloop leans a little more towards urban and hip-hop styles where 80's Purple targets a more upscale or suburban crowd. Of course one of the pioneers selling urban hipster clothing was Urban Outfitters which has been around as a company since the early 1970's.

While styles will always continue to change, urban and suburban hipsters alike are abandoning the older, more established designer brands often found in upscale department stores. The styles of the established designer brands have become stale and are often imitated. Instead young hipsters are flocking to these young, edgy and more trendy up-and-coming designer brands that can most easily be found in online retail boutiques. But will these new designer brands eventually become the established and stale brands of the future? Only time will tell!